Obama agenda: Climate change and voting rights

The AP: “President Barack Obama declared the debate over climate change and its causes obsolete Tuesday as he announced a wide-ranging plan to tackle pollution and prepare communities for global warming.”

More: “Obama also offered a rare insight into his administration’s deliberations on Keystone XL, an oil pipeline whose potential approval has sparked an intense fight between environmental activists and energy producers. The White House has insisted the State Department is making the decision independently, but Obama said Tuesday he’s instructing the department to approve it only if the project won’t increase overall, net emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Remember this quote: “Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interests. Our national interest would be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

The Washington Post from March 1: “State Dept: Keystone XL would have small impact on climate, tar sands.”

Politico: “President Barack Obama faced an uncomfortable truth Tuesday: He was powerless to stop George W. Bush’s Supreme Court from eviscerating the most consequential civil rights law of the past half-century.”

Dana Milbank: “The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did. The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague. Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.”

Chaser: “Not true” – Alito during President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union when the president rebuked the court for Citizens United.